I shall explain the notions of propositions and states of affairs as they are understood in the current ontological debate and I shall briefly relate them to similar notions in Aristotle and some Medieval authors. In contrast with the point of view of some philosophers who identify propositions and states of affairs, I shall argue that they need to be sharply distinguished. I shall then move on to a problem for propositions and, above all, states of affairs, known as Bradley’s (...) regress, and hint at discussions of this or analogous puzzles in the philosophical tradition before Bradley. Finally, I shall present my own approach to this issue, Fact Infinitism, focusing on why it would have been hardly acceptable before ontology came to have the Cantorian conception of the infinite at its disposal. (shrink)

Philosophers in the field of analytic metaphysics have begun gradually to come to terms with the fact that there are entities in a range of categories not dreamt of in the set-theory and predicate-logic-based ontologies of their forefathers. Examples of such “entia minora” would include: boundaries, places, events, states holes, shadows, individual colour- and tone-instances (tropes), together with combinations of these and associated simple and complex universal species or essences, states of affairs, judgment-contents, and myriad abstract structures of the sorts (...) which are studied by the mathematical sciences. How, as hunter-gatherer ontologists, are we to bring order into this vast array? How are we to gauge the ontological merits of given candidate entities, and how are we to understand their relation to entities of more humdrum sorts? Meinong, it turns out, offers a very simple answer to all of these questions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XXIII, Number 2, November 1997, pp. 195-212 The Moral Self and the Indirect Passions SUSAN M. PURVIANCE David Hume1 and Immanuel Kant are celebrated for their clear-headed rejection of dogmatic metaphysics, Hume for rejecting traditional metaphysical positions on cause and effect, substance, and personal identity, Kant for rejecting all judgments of experience regarding the ultimate ground of objects and their relations, not just judgments of cause (...) and substantiality. Nevertheless, each argues that practical activity is not compromised by the rejection of metaphysical claims that others had taken to be crucial. Kant and Hume thought that political and moral life did not depend upon theoretical knowlege of the nature of the self, free will, or knowledge of the true motives of actions or the character of the agent. Because the grounds of morality and politics were too important to leave to the mercies of speculative metaphysics, each moved their foundations to higher ground, insulating the grounds of practical activity from the threat of metaphysical turmoil and skepticism. Contemporary philosophers have generally followed Hume and Kant in this regard, but often select very different strategies. Some think that the best way to avoid the problems associated with contemporary scientific ontologies is to separate ethics from the factual domain entirely. Some give moral and political language a noncognitivist interpretation, and others have interpreted values as a projection of the passions and affections of the subject or as the constructions of suitably situated practical reasoners.2 At the same time there has been a resurgence of interest in moral realism. Moral realists think that the objectivity of moral discourse, and hence the Susan M. Purviance is at the Department of Philosophy, The University of Toledo, Toledo OH 43606-3390 USA. 196 Susan M. Purviance possibility of moral truth, depend upon the existence of moral facts.3 Moral realists have tended to concentrate on the role of facts in establishing the truth of general moral principles, or the Tightness or moral value of particular individual actions. For moral realists, moral facts are the states of affairs that make general moral principles or particular moral judgments true. Whether these facts are of a naturalistic sort or not, whether they are literally on a par with natural facts, or whether they simply play the same role in practical knowledge that natural facts play in theoretical knowledge, is an open question. Moral realists often are naturalists, like David O. Brink and Jonathan Dancy, but they may be nonnaturalists, like G. E. Moore.4 Ethical naturalism accounts for moral motivation and the cultivation of good character in terms of moral qualities, and many hope to ground it in (or at least show that it is compatible with) the scientific understanding of objects and their relations and qualities. Naturalism is only one option, but realism has received support because it is not clear that antirealists have developed a convincing alternative to the grounding of concepts of moral agency and moral judgment in some sort of moral facts. Questions abound about what it means to ascribe responsibility to a moral self and how we can defend a notion of enduring character. Although moral realists have paid less attention to the ontological status of virtues and character traits than to moral principles, their status is equally important. Here the concern is with the sort of metaphysics of the self thought to be necessary to account for moral agency, responsibility, praise, and blame. I shall argue that there is a class of moral facts that justify or perhaps merely vindicate the ascription of moral powers to agents, and that these are the sorts of facts another sort of theorist is interested in, whereas the states of affairs that make moral judgments true are the sorts of facts that moral realists have been interested in. In order to distinguish this use of moral facts I shall call this sort of theory a Fact of Agency Theory, and it is a version of this theory that can be found in Hume's discussion of the problem of the self and the indirect passions. A realist metaphysics of morals needs to address two questions, the question of the reality of the... (shrink)

Adolf Reinach was one of the leading figures of the Munich and Göttingen circles of phenomenology, and Husserl's first real co-worker. Although his writings are highly original and remarkably clear, Reinach's tragic death in the First World War prevented him from formulating a definitive statement of his phenomenology, leaving his name virtually unknown to all but a small circle. In his ground-breaking study, Judgment and Sachverhalt, DuBois shows how Reinach succeeds in developing a realist ontology and epistemology based on rigorous (...) argumentation and phenomenological elucidation. Drawing from numerous texts and the developments of Reinach's students and colleagues - Roman Ingarden, Alexander Pfänder and Dietrich von Hildebrand above all - DuBois presents, refines and defends Reinach's `phenomenological realism'. Confrontations of Reinach's theories of states of affairs, concepts and speech acts with the work of contemporary authors like Chisholm and Searle allow readers to evaluate Reinach's philosophy, not only in the light of the later developments of Husserl, but also in the light of certain Anglo-American developments. (shrink)

The article examines the essence and relationship of aesthetic experience and aesthetic judgment. It is argued that philosophical aesthetics deals with constants that are fundamental to aesthetic experience. Such constants are phenomena and characteristics that have a fundamental ontological status in the aesthetic sphere. It was found that the ontological characteristic of aesthetic experience is that it is not reducible to “pure” rationality, that is, it is not something that is “adapted” to complete and final comprehension by the mind alone. (...) Therefore, a complete “absorption” of aesthetic experience by a certain semantic structure is impossible: such experience always goes beyond any discursive boundaries and simultaneously opens them. In addition, aesthetic experience serves as one of the means of a person’s “contact” with the world and society. Forming on the material of sensations, aesthetic experience extends from the most general ideas about the universe to the inner life of a person. The analysis also showed that the formulation of an aesthetic judgment is based on the concepts of the perfect and the imperfect. In turn, the mastery of such concepts is carried out in the process of correlating a certain aesthetic fact with the existing value scale. That is why aesthetic judgments have signs of normativity. They also create the basis for a common worldview and attitude, lay the foundation for mutual understanding between people of a certain culture. The study showed that the process of aesthetic assessment is a constant correlation of the existing state of affairs with something ideal, this is a permanent “demand” for perfection, as well as a tireless search for an opportunity to fulfill this “demand”. At the same time, ethical experience is dissociated from “pure” pragmatics, which personifies vital necessity, because the aesthetic sphere is always associated with a certain “redundancy” in human existence. Also, the results obtained in the course of the study suggested that philosophical aesthetics, which takes into account and investigates the specificity of the phenomenon of corporeality, as well as such phenomena of human existence as affective sensitivity and sensitive rationality, is able to overcome the limitation of “an-esthetic” naturalism in aesthetics. (shrink)

Some of the most interesting recent work in philosophy of language and metaphysics is focused on questions about propositions, the abstract, truth-bearing contents of sentences and beliefs. The aim of this guide is to give instructors and students a road map for some significant work on propositions since the mid-1990s. This work falls roughly into two areas: challenges to the existence of propositions and theories about the nature and structure of propositions. The former includes both a widely discussed puzzle about (...) propositional designators as well as direct and indirect arguments against the existence of propositions. The latter is dominated by what is currently the central debate about the metaphysics of propositions, i.e. whether they are structured, composite entities or unstructured ontological simples. This issue has eclipsed older debates about whether propositions can be identified with sets of possible worlds or other kinds of sentence intensions. Author Recommends 1. Soames, Scott. 'Direct Reference, Propositional Attitudes, and Semantic Content.' Philosophical Topics 15 (1987): 47–87. Reprinted in Propositions and Attitudes . Eds. N. Salmon and S. Soames. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. 197–239. Essential groundwork for more recent work on propositions. Soames gives a careful and exacting presentation of the case against identifying propositions with sets of possible worlds or other truth-supporting circumstances. Also contains a detailed statement of the Russellian conception of propositions on which propositions are ordered sets of objects, properties and relations. 2. King, Jeffrey. 'Designating Propositions.' The Philosophical Review 111 (2002): 341–71. Sometimes substituting a definite description for a corresponding 'that'-clause can lead to bizarre changes in truth-conditions: compare 'Bill fears that Hillary will be president' with 'Bill fears the proposition that Hillary will be president'. This puzzle about propositional designators threatens the relational analysis of propositional attitude reports, the view that 'believes' expresses a relation to the proposition designated by its 'that'-clause, and thereby poses an indirect threat to the existence of propositions. King's solution posits an ambiguity in verbs like 'fear' that embed both 'that'-clauses and definite descriptions. 3. Jubien, Michael. 'Propositions and the Objects of Thought.' Philosophical Studies 104 (2001): 47–62. A direct attack on the existence of propositions. Jubien deploys an analogue of the problem that Paul Benacerraf raised for set-theoretical reductions of numbers against metaphysical reductions of propositions. Just as numbers can be reduced to sets in many different ways, any reduction of propositions brings with it equally good variants, thus making any such reduction arbitrary and unmotivated. The only alternative is to treat propositions as abstract metaphysical primitives. As Jubien argues, however, abstract primitive entities are incapable of doing what propositions must do, i.e. represent objects and states of affairs on their own, without the input of thinking subjects. The upshot is the propositions cannot be reduced and they cannot be primitive, and so they must not exist. 4. Hanks, Peter. 'How Wittgenstein Defeated Russell's Multiple Relation Theory of Judgment.' Synthese 154 (2007): 121–46. Scepticism about propositions has recently led some philosophers, Jubien included, to resuscitate Russell's multiple relation theory of judgment, the idea that judgment is a many-place relation to objects, properties and relations. This paper explains why Russell himself abandoned that theory, and why the theory is still refuted by an objection due to Wittgenstein. 5. Hofweber, Thomas. 'Inexpressible Properties and Propositions.' Oxford Studies in Metaphysics . 2 vols. Ed. D. Zimmerman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 155–206. An indirect attack on the existence of propositions. Hofweber argues that sentences like 'Bill believes something that Hillary asserted' do not commit us to the existence of propositions. His view is that propositional quantification is an instance of what he calls 'internal' or 'inferential role' quantification, a kind of quantification that carries no ontological implications. 6. Schiffer, Stephen. The Things We Mean . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. esp. chs 1–2. Schiffer defends his theory of pleonastic propositions, on which propositions are unstructured, have no parts, and are very finely grained. 7. Bealer, George. 'Propositions.' Mind 107 (1998): 1–32. Bealer defends his algebraic theory of propositions, which, like Schiffer's pleonastic account, treats propositions as unstructured metaphysical simples. 8. King, Jeffrey. The Nature of and Structure of Content . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. The best developed current theory of the structure in structured propositions. King identifies propositions with certain kinds of facts in which objects, properties and relations are bound together by amalgams of syntactic and semantic relations. 9. Hanks, Peter. 'Recent Work on Propositions.' Philosophy Compass 4 (2009): 1–18. A survey of work on propositions since the mid-1990s that complements this teaching and learning guide. Contains responses to Jubien's and Hofweber's arguments against propositions and critical discussions of Schiffer's pleonastic propositions and King's theory of propositional structure. Online Resources 1. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/propositions/ Propositions (Matthew McGrath) 2. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/propositions-structured/ Structured Propositions (Jeffrey King) 3. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/propositions-singular/ Singular Propositions (Greg Fitch) Sample Partial Syllabus The following partial syllabus can be used as a unit on recent work on propositions in graduate level courses in philosophy of language or metaphysics. Week 1: A Substitution Puzzle About Propositional Designators King, Jeffrey. 'Designating Propositions'. Moltmann, Friederike. 'Propositional Attitudes Without Propositions.' Synthese 135 (2003): 77–118. Week 2: The Benacerraf Problem and Propositional Representation Benacerraf, Paul. 'What Numbers Could Not Be.' Philosophical Review 74 (1965): 47–73. Jubien, Michael. 'Propositions and the Objects of Thought.' Week 3: Propositional Quantification Hofweber, Thomas. 'Inexpressible Properties and Propositions'. Hofweber, Thomas. 'A Puzzle about Ontology.' Noûs 39 (2005): 256–83. Week 4: Schiffer on Pleonastic Propositions Schiffer, Stephen. 'Language-Created Language-Independent Entities.' Philosophical Topics 24 (1996): 149–67. Schiffer, Stephen. The Things We Mean , chs 1–2. Week 5: King on Structured Propositions King, Jeffrey. 'Structured Propositions and Complex Predicates.' Noûs , 29 (1995): 516–35. King, Jeffrey. The Nature and Structure of Content , chs 1–3. Focus Questions 1. Why does identifying propositions with sentence intensions, e.g. sets of possible worlds, 'require the attitudes to have a particular sort of closure under logical consequence, which they clearly don't have' (Mark Richard)? 2. How does the difference between (a) and (b) pose a threat to the existence of propositions? (a) Bill fears that Hillary will be president. (b) Bill fears the proposition that Hillary will be president. 3. What is the Benacerraf problem for metaphysical reductions of propositions? 4. Why must a proposition represent 'on its own cuff' (Michael Jubien)? Why is this a problem for the view that propositions are primitive abstract entities? 5. What does it mean to say that propositions are structured ? Give two different accounts of what propositional structure might be. (shrink)

Epistemologies and research methods are not free of metaphysics. This is to say that they are both, supported by (or presumed by), and support (or presume) fundamental ontologies. A discussion of the epistemological foundations of "multimethod" research in the social sciences—in as much as such research claims to unearth "causal" relations—therefore cannot avoid the ontological presuppositions or implications of such a discussion. But though there isn’t necessarily a perfect correspondence between ontology, epistemology, and methodology, they do constrain each other. As (...) such it is possible to make methodological choices that are at odds with one’s (implicit) ontology or argue from an ontology that is inconsistent one’s choice of methods.Yet lack of recognition of this fact has hampered methodological discussions in political science, especially with respect to the discussion on the merits of multimethod research. The ontology implicitly accepted in such discussions is "reductionist" and "regularist," that is, one that respectively defines causes in terms of noncausal relations and states of affair and affirms that such noncausal relations are regularities in nature. This article will argue that any attempt to fit "multimethod" research (where "multimethod" signifies some combination of inferential statistics and case studies) within this narrow ontology is destined to fail since such a metaphysics logically cannot accord case studies a necessary or sufficient role in the in the establishment of causal relations. However, there are metaphysical positions within the ambit of an empiricist philosophy of science that can accommodate multiple methods without contradiction. The article discusses two such ontologies and suggests ways in which they might allow the establishment of a coherent epistemological foundation for multimethod research, however, within a decidedly empiricist philosophy of science. (shrink)

Sciences of complex systems thrive on compositional theories – toolkits that allow the construction of models of a wide range of systems, each consisting of various parts put together in different ways. To be tractable, a compositional theory must make shrewd choices about the parts and properties that constitute its basic ontology. One such choice is to decompose a system into spatiotemporally discrete parts. Compositional theories in the high-level sciences follow this rule of thumb to a certain extent, but they (...) also make essential use of what I call distributed ontologies: divisions of the system into entities or states of affairs each depending on sets of fundamental-level facts that to a large extent overlap. The point is developed using the example of statistical theories in which the probabilities are ontologically distributed. (shrink)

When and why does awareness of a belief's genealogy render it irrational to continue holding that belief? According to explanationism, awareness of a belief’s genealogy gives rise to an epistemic defeater when and because it reveals that the belief is not explanatorily connected to the relevant worldly facts. I argue that an influential recent version of explanationism, due to Korman and Locke, incorrectly implies that it is not rationally permissible to adopt a “sparse” ontology of worldly facts or states of (...) affairs. I then propose a new explanationist account of genealogical defeat capable of accommodating rational belief in ontological sparsity. According to my account, awareness of a belief’s genealogy gives rise to a defeater when and because it reveals that the belief is not explanatorily connected to its truthmaker. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.1 (2002) 77-89 [Access article in PDF] Time and Judgment in Demosthenes' De Corona 1 - [PDF] Michael S. Kochin Hannah Arendt concludes the first volume of The Life of the Mind thus: If judgment is our faculty for dealing with the past, the historian is the inquiring man who by relating it sits in judgment over it. If that is so, we may reclaim our (...) human dignity, win it back, as it were, from that pseudo-divinity named History of the modern age, without denying history's importance but denying its right to being the ultimate judge. Old Cato... has left us a curious phrase which aptly sums up the political principle implied in the enterprise of reclamation. He said: "Victrix causa deis placit, sed victa Catoni" ("The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the defeated one pleases Cato"). (1978, 1: 216) 2This article is an exercise in reclamation of the kind that Hannah Arendt describes. I wish to reclaim the cause for which Demosthenes struggled, the cause of democratic freedom, from the judgment of history expressed in the defeat of Athens and her allies at the hands of Philip of Macedon. Though politics is attenuated in the contemporary world, we can understand the peculiar characteristics of political action by reconstructing in our imagination those moments in the past when political life was richest. Here I am going to take up an aspect of political action that is particularly well-illuminated in Demosthenes' speech On the Crown: the role of time in the judgment of political action. 3We can approach Demosthenes' political career for a variety of purposes: The easiest to understand, because it is in many ways the most superficial, is with the motives of the humanist. We study the political speeches of Demosthenes in order to be inspired to value political freedom [End Page 77] and to learn how it can be defended. The trouble with this view is that it assumes that the conditions for political action are present for us, as they were for Demosthenes in the Athens of his time, and that political action is itself something serious men (and now women) ought to undertake. That these two assumptions are edifying and patriotic does not make them true.We can also approach Demosthenes as an exercise in historical science (that is, historische Wissenschaft). The scientific historian wants to learn the facts about the rise of Philip's hegemony over Greece. The scientific historian therefore prefers objectivity to edification. As George Cawkwell, a leading participant in the Demosthenesstreit in the '60s and '70s, wrote, "Moral edification and history can be kept separate" (1969, 166).I find this the most difficult purpose to understand, because it is unclear how this scientific-historical perspective can be connected with the human-all-too-human perspectives of the participants. When, for example, Cawkwell writes of the age of Demosthenes that "The central fact of the age is military, not moral—viz. the huge preponderance in military potential of the Macedonian state over the power of any Greek state," he cites a fact whose truth he himself perceives in part from Philip's victory over the Thebans and Athenians at Chaeroneia in 338 B.C.E. and Alexander's campaign against Thebes in 335. 4 Cawkwell does not trouble himself to explain how Demosthenes or anybody else could possibly have learned the fact of Philip's greater military strength and resources prior to these events. Nor does Cawkwell refute the claim that given Philip's failures before Perinthos and Byzantium in 340, at the very time that Demosthenes led the Athenians to war it was reasonable to suppose Philip much weaker than he had seemed, or seems to us (Pickard-Cambridge 1979, 491). 5 He does not even show how Philip could have known his own capabilities prior to his success. It is thus unclear what use historical-scientific judgment could be, since it is not clear how to relate historical-scientific judgment to the judgment of participants in human affairs.I should stop here, not least because I... (shrink)

The paper investigates the role played by ethical deliberation and ethical judgment in Wittgenstein's early thought in the light of twentieth?century German legal philosophy. In particular the theories of the phenomenologists Adolf Reinach, Wilhelm Schapp, and Gerhart Husserl are singled out, as resting on ontologies which are structurally similar to that of the Tractatus: in each case it is actual and possible Sachverhalte which constitute the prime ontological category. The study of the relationship between the states of affairs depicted, e.g., (...) in the sentences of a legal trial and prior fact?complexes to which these may correspond suggests one possible connecting link between the logical and ontological sections of the Tractatus and the ethical reflections appearing at the end. It is argued that the latter can best be understood in terms of the idea of a ?last judgment? (with its associated ethical rewards and punishments) which would relate to the world as a whole as a penal trial relates to individual complexes of facts. (shrink)

I analyze the relations of constituency or ``being in'' that connect different ontological items in the Tractatus logico-philosophicus by Wittgenstein. A state of affairs is constituted by atoms, atoms are in a state of affairs. Atoms are also in an atomic fact. Moreover, the world is the totality of facts, thus it is in some sense made of facts. Many other kinds of Tractarian notions -- such as molecular facts, logical space, reality -- seem to be involved in (...) constituency relations. How should these relations be conceived? And how is it possible to formalize them in a convincing way? I draw a comparison between two ways of conceiving and formalizing these relations: through sets and through mereological sums. The comparison shows that the conceptual machinery of set theory is apter to conceive and formalize Tractarian constituency notions than the mereological one. (shrink)

Gene patenting was enabled by strained interpretations of legal precedent and with very little consideration of its ultimate ethical implications. The sciences of justice, ethics, and morals remain in their dark ages, with their practitioners all ascribing to differing values and modes of inquiry, besieged in their various camps of deontological, or consequentialist, or emotive or theistic dogmas. Ownership and property rights in moveables are good candidates for grounded relations as opposed to intellectual property. The groundedness of a valid possession (...) rests on the intentional state of the possessor and other external and objective facts of the possession. The ontology of the social and legal institution of ownership reveals that it is grounded in certain states of affairs, such as brute‐worldly facts and intentional states, as well as social acts revealing intentions of the parties. (shrink)

Bergmann has proposed an ontology that contains an entity many find strange: particularity. And in fact, Bergmann, too, seems to find it strange. He proposes a phenomenological method in ontology, and holds, as he therefore should, that particularity is presented. Nonetheless, he also holds that it is ineffable, that its presence in a particular is an unsayable state of affairs, and that it is something which is not a thing and yet is also not nothing. Bergmann’s position has been (...) long developing, but especially in three recent essays. The aim of the present essay is to explore these views. We shall examine Bergmann’s method, and some criticisms of it by Rosenberg, in order to see whether we cannot get a better grasp of particularity. Specifically, we shall try to see whether it is not, after all, effable. It will turn out that this disagreement on the effability of particularity is really three disagreements: one concerning whether a particular can be thought apart from particularity, a second concerning the analysis of intentionality, and a third concerning whether, in the ontologically important sense of ‘different’, entities that are different are separable. (shrink)

Few researchers of the past made sense of the collapse of representations in the quantum domain, and looked for a new process of sense-making below the level of representations: the level of the phenomenology of perception and action; the level of the elaboration of knowledge out of experience. But some recent philosophical readings of quantum physics all point in this direction. They all recognize the fact that the quantum revolution is a revolution in our conception of knowledge. In these recent (...) readings of quantum physics, quantum states are primarily generators of probabilistic valuations. Accordingly, they should not be seen as statements about what is the case, but as statements about what each agent can reasonably expect to be the case. Three features of such non-interpretational, non-committal approaches to quantum physics strongly evoke the phenomenological epistemology. These are: their deliberately first-person stance; their suspension of judgment about a presumably external domain of objects, and subsequent redirection of attention towards the activity of constituting these objects; their perception-like conception of quantum knowledge. But beyond phenomenological epistemology, these new approaches of quantum physics also make implicit use of a phenomenological ontology. Chris Fuch’s participatory realism thus formulates a non-external variety of realism for one who is deeply immersed in reality. But participatory realism strongly resembles Merleau-Ponty’s endo-ontology, which is a phenomenological ontology for one who deeply participates in Being. This remarkable analogy is supported by Merleau-Ponty himself. Indeed, 50 years before QBism, Merleau-Ponty acknowledged the strong kinship between the status of quantum mechanics and his phenomenology of embodiment. He did so in two texts that remained unpublished until after his death: Visible and invisible, and the Lectures on Nature. The final part of this article is then devoted to a study of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of quantum physics. (shrink)

The states of affairs are one of the basic categories of the formal ontology in the husserlian sense of this word. They are the objectiv correlates of judgements and they have an existence independent of propositions and of acts of judging. Their form is "the being-b of A". States of affairs have different properties. One of the most important is that they are bearers of ontological modalities. In this respect the analysis of the different classes of modalities needs to be (...) completed for ontological investigations which make clear the several types of essences and the laws which are grounded in these essences. (shrink)

Representing moral choice as a function of rational choice is carried out by formalizing moral evaluation into a functional mechanism called "Moral Choice Function" whose domain is information on a state of affairs and range is a moral judgment, and upon which formal and substantive requirements are imposed. The notions such as impartiality, universalizability, proportionality, and informational invariance are employed for the issue of how to solve conflict of values faced by an individual as well as collective moral agent. (...) By utilizing the structural affinity with post-Arrovian social choice theory, it is shown that inter-attribute commensurability is indispensable for any serious moral agent who wants to solve conflict of values through pluralistic maximizing. It is also shown that once the morally relevant attributes are identified, formal requirements are powerful enough to qualify the function to behave in a certain way such that the formulas for pluralistic maximizing vary with the modes of inter-attribute commensurability. It is also shown how it is still possible to manage conflict of values rationally without value commensurability by interpreting John Rawls's theory of justice as neo-Kantian in dealing with conflicting desiderata from Kantian deontology and utilitarian consequentialism. The metaethical tenets for the project are also argued for such that it is neutral about the ontological status of morality; but it is anti-Humean with its supervenience thesis, anti-Moorean with its reducibility thesis, and anti-naturalist with its syntheticity thesis. It is also argued that behind the project there lies a fundamental metaphysical conception of an entity as a bundle of properties conjoined with epistemic foundationalism, which is evidenced not only in moral evaluation but also in other kinds of cognitive activity. (shrink)

Moving from a critical discussion of some background assumptions of the Hegel-Renaissance within Anglo-American philosophy, this paper focuses on some crucial points of Hegel’s theory of objective thought and on their relation to Hegel’s philosophical project. Focusing on Hegel’s theory of objective thought is essential to define the position of the Hegelian philosophy within the debate between idealism and realism. That theory determines the Concept as the system of epistemic categories and, at the same time, as the system of ontological (...) structures. Thereby, it allows Hegel to hold that we have a direct epistemic access to the movement of reality. This movement is a process of determination carried out by the ontological structures of the Concept. This process determines states of affairs as possible contents of thought. There is no gap between thought and world. In this way Hegel’s direct epistemological realism opens the possibility that an objective-constraint (i.e., a constraint which is external to thought as a mental activity), is a rational-constraint as well. The paper gives an account of the Hegelian theory of truth as co-implication of truth in ontological sense and propositional truth. The latter is interpreted along the lines of an identity theory of truth, i.e. as identity between the content of a judgment and the object. The Hegelian theory of truth, conceived in this way, on the basis of the identity between forms of the cognizing subject and forms of reality, and so based on the ontological notion of truth, makes possible to state within the framework of Hegel’s philosophy the ticklish question of the relation between philosophy and common sense. Unlike the retrieval of a second naivety gained by means of philosophical therapy à la Putnam or McDowell, the Hegelian philosophy proposes a rationally responsible reappropriation of our theoretical and practical relationships with natural and social reality, in the spirit of a constructive, systematic philosophy. (shrink)

I discuss the foundations of predicate ontologies based on two model notions – elementary states of affairs and eventualities, i.e. ordered pairs of initial and end states of affairs. Vendlerian classifications are oriented towards elementary states and tense logic, while Davidsonian classifications deal with eventualities and event logic. There are two kinds of atemporal predicates - fact and properties. Facts are propositional arguments of second-order predicates which add a special meaning that the embedded proposition was verified. Properties are atemporal first-order (...) predicates that lack eventive interpretation and are not associated with factive frames. Davidsonian states are homogeneous durable spatiotemporal things distinct both from atemporal properties and spatiotemporal dynamic predicates. Davidsonian states are causally independent, while resultatives are causally determined as they reconstruct a preceding event that has caused the end state p. I discuss the contrast between external and internal Davidsonian states. The former lack a priority argument and can be quantified extensionally. The latter have a priority experiential argument and can only be quantified intensionally. External states can be observed, while internal states cannot. (shrink)

Expressivism, the view that ethical claims are expressions of psychological states, has advantages such as closing the gap between normative claims and motivation and avoiding difficulties posed by the ontological status of values. However, it seems to make substantive moral disagreement impossible. Here, we develop a suggestion from William James as a pragmatist extension of expressivism. If we look at a set of moral claims from the perspective of the maximally comprehensive set of co-possible satisfactions, then a claim can be (...) treated as true if it is part of that set. There then is a practical “fact of the matter” about the members of such a set. This makes the notion of moral truth analogous to pragmatic notions of scientific truth, defined as what will withstand inquiry to its ideal limit, and thereby provides a way for expressivists to make sense of moral disagreement. (shrink)

In this paper, I relate key features of Adolf Reinach’s abundant ontology of propositional states of affairs of his to Armstrong’s—or an Armstrongian—state of affairs ontology, with special regard to finding out how sparse or abundant the latter is with respect to negative states of affairs. After introducing the issue, I clarify the notion of a propositional state of affairs, paying special attention to the notion of abstract versus concrete. I show how Reinach’s states of affairs are propositional, (...) and how they compare with Chisholm’s well-known propositional states of affairs. In the next section, I outline Reinach’s five roles for states of affairs and show that only one of them is relevant to Armstrongian state of affairs ontology. In the following section, I utilise this role to create a ranking of state of affairs ontologies according to how abundant they are. It is, however, unclear which level Armstrongian state of affairs ontology is at, since it is unclear if, like Reinach’s ontology, it includes negative states of affairs. In the final section, I argue that the answer is a qualified ‘yes’, i.e. it does not occupy the sparsest level. (shrink)

The paper attempts to clarify some fundamental aspects of an explanationof the concept of truth which is neither “deflationary” nor “substantive”.The main aspect examined in detail concerns the ontological dimension of truth, the mind/language-world connection traditionally associated with the concept of truth. It is claimed that it does not make sense to defend or reject a relatedness of truth to the ontological dimension so long as the kind of presupposed or envisaged ontology is not made explicit and critically examined. In (...) particular, it is shown that generally an “objectual” ontology is – often only implicitly – presupposed, i.e., an ontology admitting “objects” (substances), properties, relations, sometimes also facts, events, and the like. The paper demonstrates that such an ontology derives from the Principle of Semantic Sentential Compositionality and that this principle should be rejected. It introduces instead the Principle of Semantic Sentential Contextuality (or Context Principle) as the semantic basis of a new ontology, an ontology of “primary states of affairs”. After sketching such an ontology, it is shown that the relatedness of truth to the ontological dimension becomes intelligible. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 21 This paper spells out the following line of thought: How much we care about various things is in constant flux, even as the world remains as it was. Internal affective shifts due to changes in mood, arousal-states or even hunger cause us to be more or less concerned about something. Further, there often isn't any fact of the matter about how much we ought to care about something. As I argue, it isn't the case that (...) there are prudential or moral norms that fix how worried we should be about every state of affairs in the world. And this suggests that what we should do, both prudentially and morally, is often subject to our affective shifts, at least if how much we care about something is an important element of practical reasoning. (shrink)

A ‘state of affairs’ is understood here as any kind of concrete entity that can play the role of truthmaker. Different ontologies propose different structures of entities to work as ‘states of affairs’ in this sense. Defenders of universals will propose for the role non- mereological structures of universals, objects and times. Defenders of tropes will propose tropes, either with or without universals and objects. Resemblance nominalists will propose primitive ontological facts of resemblance between objects in time. In any (...) of these cases, times are an essential component of a state of affairs. Any ontology of states of affairs, then, should clarify what times are in order to clarify what states of affairs are. An examination of the dominant reductivist conceptions of times shows that these connections have not yet been thought through carefully. In any of the dominant reductivist conceptions, times are entities that either include or describe everything that happens simultaneously at a given instant. Even in some cases they include the description of everything that happens at any time. If one introduce times taken as they are in any of these reductivist conceptions, it will be essential to a state of affairs everything that happens simultaneously with it, or even everything that happens at any time. Under some assumptions the internal relation of every state of affairs with every other state of affairs expands to the internal relation of everything with everything. This is an unhappy theoretical situation that calls for a more careful consideration of some central tenets in our ontology of time. (shrink)

Neo-Kantianism is common conceived as a philosophy ‘from above’, excelling in speculative constructions – as opposed to the attitude of patient description which is exemplified by the phenomenological turn ‘to the things themselves’. When we study the work of Emil Lask in its relation to that of Husserl and the phenomenologists, however, and when we examine the influences moving in both directions, then we discover that this idea of a radical opposition is misconceived. Lask himself was influenced especially by Husserl’s (...) Logical Investigations, and Husserl, especially in his later writings, was in some respects closer to Kant than were the Neo-Kantians. The contrast between the two philosophers can be illustrated by looking at their view of the objects of judgment; for Lask, as for Kant, judgment can relate to the thing as such only in an indirect way. The world of judgment is a collection of ‘imitations holding a secondary position’. It is cut apart from the plain world of real things by what Lask calls a ‘chasm of artificiality and imagery’. For Husserl, in contrast, the object of judgment is a ‘Sachverhalt’ or state of affairs, something ontologically ‘positive’ in the sense that it is an entity in its own right and does not point beyond itself in the manner of a mere sign or proxy for something else. (shrink)

Neo-Kantianism is common conceived as a philosophy ‘from above’, excelling in speculative constructions – as opposed to the attitude of patient description which is exemplified by the phenomenological turn ‘to the things themselves’. When we study the work of Emil Lask in its relation to that of Husserl and the phenomenologists, however, and when we examine the influences moving in both directions, then we discover that this idea of a radical opposition is misconceived. Lask himself was influenced especially by Husserl’s (...) Logical Investigations, and Husserl, especially in his later writings, was in some respects closer to Kant than were the Neo-Kantians. The contrast between the two philosophers can be illustrated by looking at their view of the objects of judgment; for Lask, as for Kant, judgment can relate to the thing as such only in an indirect way. The world of judgment is a collection of ‘imitations holding a secondary position’. It is cut apart from the plain world of real things by what Lask calls a ‘chasm of artificiality and imagery’. For Husserl, in contrast, the object of judgment is a ‘Sachverhalt’ or state of affairs, something ontologically ‘positive’ in the sense that it is an entity in its own right and does not point beyond itself in the manner of a mere sign or proxy for something else. (shrink)

Commentators have long agreed that Wodeham’s account of objects of judgment is highly innovative, but they have continued to disagree about its proper interpretation. Some read him as introducing items that are merely supervenient on (and nothing in addition to) Aristotelian substances and accidents; others take him to be introducing a new type of entity in addition to substances and accidents—namely, abstract states of affairs. In this paper, I argue that both interpretations are mistaken: the entities Wodeham introduces are really (...) distinct from substances and accidents, but, like substances and accidents, they are concrete (rather than abstract). Moreover, the key to understanding the significance of his theory, I contend, lies in a proper understanding of the theoretical role these entities play in his theory of judgment. (shrink)

The five English words—sentence, proposition, judgment, statement, and fact—are central to coherent discussion in logic. However, each is ambiguous in that logicians use each with multiple normal meanings. Several of their meanings are vague in the sense of admitting borderline cases. In the course of displaying and describing the phenomena discussed using these words, this paper juxtaposes, distinguishes, and analyzes several senses of these and related words, focusing on a constellation of recommended senses. One of the purposes of this paper (...) is to demonstrate that ordinary English properly used has the resources for intricate and philosophically sound investigation of rather deep issues in logic and philosophy of language. No mathematical, logical, or linguistic symbols are used. Meanings need to be identified and clarified before being expressed in symbols. We hope to establish that clarity is served by deferring the extensive use of formalized or logically perfect languages until a solid “informal” foundation has been established. Questions of “ontological status”—e.g., whether propositions or sentences, or for that matter characters, numbers, truth-values, or instants, are “real entities”, are “idealizations”, or are “theoretical constructs”—plays no role in this paper. As is suggested by the title, this paper is written to be read aloud. -/- I hope that reading this aloud in groups will unite people in the enjoyment of the humanistic spirit of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

The problem of merging several ontologies has important applications in the Semantic Web, medical ontology engineering and other domains where information from several distinct sources needs to be integrated in a coherent manner.We propose to view ontology merging as a problem of social choice, i.e. as a problem of aggregating the input of a set of individuals into an adequate collective decision. That is, we propose to view ontology merging as ontology aggregation. As a first step in this direction, we (...) formulate several desirable properties for ontology aggregators, we identify the incompatibility of some of these properties, and we define and analyse several simple aggregation procedures. Our approach is closely related to work in judgment aggregation, but with the crucial difference that we adopt an open world assumption, by distinguishing between facts not included in an agent’s ontology and facts explicitly negated in an agent’s ontology. (shrink)

It is now often taken for granted that facts are entia non grata, for there exists a powerful argument (dubbed the slingshot), which is backed by such great names as Frege or Gödel or Davidson (and so could hardly be wrong), that discredits their existence. There indeed is such an argument, and it indeed is not wrong on the straightforward sense of wrong. However, in how far it knocks down any conception of facts is another story, a story which is (...) anything but simple and perspicuous. In his book, Stephen Neale takes pains to excavate the origins of the argument and the presuppositions which it needs to be usable for the purpose of exorcising facts. In the introduction of the book, Neale expresses his conviction that his analysis of the slingshot will not only compromise its usability for the purpose of discrediting facts, but also save representationalist conceptions of language and mind from the attacks of the antirepresentationalist philosophers like Davidson and Rorty. „Representational philosophy,“ he claims, „survives the Davidson-Rorty onslaught because non-truth-functional logics and ontologies of facts, states of affairs, situations and propositions survive not only the actual arguments deployed against them, but also the most precise and powerful slingshot arguments that can be constructed.“ However, what he does take his analyses to show is that „the most precise and powerful slingshot arguments demonstrate conclusively that the logical and ontological theories originally targeted must satisfy non-trivial conditions if they are to avoid logical or ontological collapse.“ (P. 12) The book starts with the discussion of the philosophy of Donald Davidson, who appears to have brought the slingshot argument to the current prominence within philosophical discussions. Here we encounter the first variant of the slingshot: Consider two sentences φ and ψ and a proper name d. Consider the definite descriptions ‘the object x such that (x = d and φ)’ and ‘the object x such that (x = d and ψ)’.. (shrink)

Abstract In this paper I undertake an in-depth examination of an oft mentioned but rarely expounded upon state: suspended judgment. While traditional epistemology is sometimes characterized as presenting a “yes or no” picture of its central attitudes, in fact many of these epistemologists want to say that there is a third option: subjects can also suspend judgment. Discussions of suspension are mostly brief and have been less than clear on a number of issues, in particular whether this third option (...) should be thought of as an attitude or not. In this paper I argue that suspended judgment is (or at least involves) a genuine attitude. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-17 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9753-y Authors Jane Friedman, St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 3UJ UK Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116. (shrink)

Truthmaker theory has been used to argue for substantial conclusions about the categorial structure of the world, in particular that states of affairs are needed to play the role of truthmakers. In this paper, I argue that closely considering the role of aboutness in truthmaking, that is considering what truthbearers are about, yields the result that there is no good truthmaker-based reason to think that truthmakers must be states of affairs understood as existing entities, whether complex or simple. First, I (...) introduce an aboutness-based account of truthmaking as a metaphysically modest alternative to the orthodox necessitarian account of truthmaking. Second, I discuss the distinction between states and events that has been made on the basis of linguistic evidence regarding aspectual markers and nominalisation. I argue that the modest approach to truthmaking allows us to accept that there is a real distinction between states and events without requiring that the distinction is ontologically substantial. Specifically, what we are talking about with state-truthbearers really differs from what we are talking about with event-truthbearers, but this difference need not be understood as a difference in kinds of entities. Because of its overall modesty, this is a theoretically virtuous result. (shrink)

As conceived by analytic philosophers ontology consists in the application of the methods of mathematical logic to the analysis of ontological discourse. As conceived by realist philosophers such as Meinong and the early Husserl, Reinach and Ingarden, it consists in the investigation of the forms of entities of various types. The suggestion is that formal methods be employed by phenomenological ontologists, and that phenomenological insights may contribute to the construction of adequate formal-ontological languages. The paper sketches an account of what (...) might be involved in this new discipline, an account which is illustrated in application to the formal-ontological problems raised by negative states of affairs. (shrink)

The problem of concept representation is relevant for many sub-fields of cognitive research, including psychology and philosophy, as well as artificial intelligence. In particular, in recent years it has received a great deal of attention within the field of knowledge representation, due to its relevance for both knowledge engineering as well as ontology-based technologies. However, the notion of a concept itself turns out to be highly disputed and problematic. In our opinion, one of the causes of this state of (...) affairs is that the notion of a concept is, to some extent, heterogeneous, and encompasses different cognitive phenomena. This results in a strain between conflicting requirements, such as compositionality, on the one hand and the need to represent prototypical information on the other. In some ways artificial intelligence research shows traces of this situation. In this paper, we propose an analysis of this current state of affairs. Since it is our opinion that a mature methodology with which to approach knowledge representation and knowledge engineering should also take advantage of the empirical results of cognitive psychology concerning human abilities, we outline some proposals for concept representation in formal ontologies, which take into account suggestions from psychological research. Our basic assumption is that knowledge representation systems whose design takes into account evidence from experimental psychology may therefore give better results in many applications. (shrink)

This article reviews the little examined early work of the Greek Marxist and state theorist, Nicos Poulantzas (1936–1979). In his first book, Nature du choses et droit of 1965, the young scholar developed a sociology of law culled from the insights of philosophical ontology. The article sets out the central claims of that book and reflects on its place in Poulantzas's intellectual development. Drawing on Heidegger, Sartre and Marx, Poulantzas proposed a species of Natural Law theory that unified ‘facts’ (...) and ‘values’ by grounding legal concepts in a theory of social praxis centred on material labour. Legal categories were thus irreducible to ahistorical essences but were, rather, expressions of mankind's struggle to realize its intrinsic freedom. As we shall see, although flawed and in key respects radically at odds with his later anti-humanism, Poulantzas's legal ontology nevertheless anticipated his mature theory of the state by setting out a philosophical sociology of the political order rooted in an anti-essentialist mode of inquiry. (shrink)

The modalities come into the world by being projections or objectivizations of our epistemic constitution. Thus this paper is a statement of Humean projectivism. In fact, it goes beyond Simon Blackburn’s version. It is also designed as a comprehensive counter-program to David Lewis’ program of Humean supervenience. In detail, the paper explains: Already the basic fact that the world is a world of states of affairs is due to the nature of our epistemic states. Objects, which figure in states of (...) affairs and which embody metaphysical modality, are constitutable by their essential properties and in fact constituted by us according to our ontological policies. What the facts are, to which the correspondence notion of truth refers, is determined by applying an epistemic or pragmatic notion of truth to the world. Causation is a specific objectivization of our conditional beliefs. Nomicity is a ‘habit of belief’, a specific way of generalizing epistemic attitudes. This covers the basic metaphysical and natural modalities. The paper attempts to convey that talking of projection or objectivization is not just imagery, but a constructively realizable program. (shrink)

To be a realist about modality, need one claim that more exists than just the various objects and properties that populate the world—e.g. worlds other than the actual one, or maximal consistent sets of propositions? Or does the existence of objects and properties by itself involve the obtaining of necessities (and possibilities) in re? The latter position is now unpopular but not unfamiliar. Aristotle held that objects have essences, and hence necessarily have certain properties. Recently it has been argued that (...) the identity of any property is tied to the natural laws in which it figures, which entails that the occurrence of properties involves the obtaining of nomological necessities ([24], pp. 206-33 and 234-60; [23]; cf. [25] and [6]). Somewhat less recently, Wittgenstein ([28], p. 168) worried that the reality of at least some properties—precise shades of colors being a prime example—involved the obtaining in re of certain impossibilities. This paper argues that Wittgenstein’s worries were right, and not just concerning some properties, but all properties whatever. That there are objects and properties in the world at all, then, amounts to there obtaining modal states of affairs. This argument supplements, rather than replaces, the others. The position on property incompatibility advanced here actually helps defend Aristotelian essentialism against epistemological objections, or so I have argued ([15]). And while this paper’s position on property incompatibility diverges from the idea that a property’s nomic profile is essential to it—more on this in the next section—it is at least compatible with the thought that the necessity involved in the laws of nature enters into ontology at the ground level. (shrink)

The problem with model-theoretic modal semantics is that it provides only the formal beginnings of an account of the semantics of modal languages. In the case of non-modal language, we bridge the gap between semantics and mere model theory, by claiming that a sentence is true just in case it is true in an intended model. Truth in a model is given by the model theory, and an intended model is a model which has as domain the actual objects of (...) discourse, and which relates these objects in an appropriate manner. However, the same strategy applied to the modal case seems to require an intended modal model whose domain includes mere possibilia. Building on recent work by Christopher Menzel (Synthese 85 (1990)), I give an account of model-theoretic semantics for modal languages which does not require mere possibilia or intensional entities of any kind. Menzel has offered a representational account of model-theoretic modal semantics that accords with actualist scruples, since it does not require possibilia. However, Menzel's view is in the company of other actualists who seek to eliminate possible worlds, but whose accounts tolerate other sorts of abstract, intensional entities, such as possible states of affairs. Menzel's account crucially depends on the existence of properties and relations in intension. I offer a purely extensional, representational account and prove that it does all the work that Menzel's account does. The result of this endeavor is an account of model theoretic semantics for modal languages requiring nothing but pure sets and the actual objects of discourse. Since ontologically beyond what is prima facie presupposed by the model theory itself. Thus, the result is truly an ontology-free model-theoretic semantics for modal languages. That is to say, getting genuine modal semantics out of the model theory is ontologically cost-free. Since my extensional account is demonstrably no less adequate, and yet is at the same time more ontologically frugal, it is certainly to be preferred. (shrink)

In the literature on free will, fatalism, and determinism, a distinction is commonly made between temporally intrinsic (‘hard’) and temporally relational (‘soft’) facts at times; determinism, for instance, is the thesis that the temporally intrinsic state of the world at some given past time, together with the laws, entails a unique future (relative to that time). Further, it is commonly supposed by incompatibilists that only the ‘hard facts’ about the past are fixed and beyond our control, whereas the ‘soft (...) facts’ about the past needn’t be. A substantial literature arose in connection with this distinction, though no consensus emerged as to the proper way to analyze it. It is time, I believe, to revisit these issues. The central claim of this paper is that the attempts to analyze the hard/soft fact distinction got off on fundamentally the wrong track. The crucial feature of soft facts is that they (in some sense) depend on the future. Following recent work on the notion of dependence, however, I argue that the literature on the soft/hard distinction has failed to capture the sense of dependence at stake. This is because such attempts have tried to capture softness in terms of purely modal notions like entailment and necessitation. As I hope to show, however, such notions cannot capture the sort of asymmetrical dependence relevant to soft facthood. Arguing for this claim is the first goal of this paper. My second goal is to gesture towards what an adequate account of soft facthood will really look like. (shrink)

In this article I briefly discuss two problems of ontology of states of affairs: the issue of negative states of affairs and the so-called slingshot argument. In particular, I consider several objections against negative states of affairs, including this one: if one accepts the existence of negative states of affairs, why not accept the existence of conjunctive states of affairs (or, alternatively, Shefferian ones, or even binegative ones), which results, it seems, in the acceptance of the existence of states of (...) affairs of any logical form. I argue that regardless of this doubt, at least some negative sentences have (non-trivial) ontological correlates. As for the slingshot argument, I argue that it is not the implicated Principle of Extensionality that is at fault, but the principle of the identity of the correlates of logically equivalent sentences (often called ‘Wittgenstein’s Principle’), which is simply false since ‘2+2=4’ and ‘8-5=3’ are just logically equivalent. (shrink)

Summary The author stresses the fact-transcendent import of knowledge. A non-ontological theory of possibility is given as well as an extensional explication of fact-transcendent and contrary-to-fact conditionals by defining the fact-transcending conditional as an extensional conditional within a field of possibilities over a domain of states of affairs. The theory of fact-transcendent conditionals is used to establish an explication of nomological and quasinomological sentences. Some methodological consequences of this conception are discussed.

In his book Persons and Objects, Professor Chisholm undertakes to show the satisfactoriness of an ontology which does not admit the existence of concrete events, such as sneezings, runnings, etc. He attempts to show that if we allow the existence of states of affairs, these being everlastingly existing entities, we need not acknowledge the existence of those perishing entities which are concrete events. I n this paper I discuss the tenability of this contention, considering especially whether the reductions that Chisholm (...) offers cope satisfactorily with the phenomena of tense. I conclude that they do not. My conclusion is that, at this point in history, we do not know whether ontology can do without concrete events. (shrink)

In his book Persons and Objects, Professor Chisholm undertakes to show the satisfactoriness of an ontology which does not admit the existence of concrete events, such as sneezings, runnings, etc. He attempts to show that if we allow the existence of states of affairs, these being everlastingly existing entities, we need not acknowledge the existence of those perishing entities which are concrete events. I n this paper I discuss the tenability of this contention, considering especially whether the reductions that Chisholm (...) offers cope satisfactorily with the phenomena of tense. I conclude that they do not. My conclusion is that, at this point in history, we do not know whether ontology can do without concrete events. (shrink)

This book gathers together thirteen of Peter van Inwagen's essays on metaphysics, several of which have acquired the status of modern classics in their field. They range widely across such topics as Quine's philosophy of quantification, the ontology of fiction, the part-whole relation, the theory of 'temporal parts', and human knowledge of modal truths. In addition, van Inwagen considers the question as to whether the psychological continuity theory of personal identity is compatible with materialism, and defends the thesis that possible (...) states of affairs are abstract objects, in opposition to David Lewis's 'extreme modal realism'. A specially-written introduction completes the collection, which will be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in metaphysics. (shrink)

In this article I advocate a worldly account of normative reasons according to which there is an ontological gap between these and the premises of practical thought, i.e. motivating considerations. While motivating considerations are individuated fine-grainedly, normative reasons should be classified as coarse-grained entities, e.g. as states of affairs, in order to explain certain necessary truths about them and to make sense of how we count and weigh them. As I briefly sketch, acting for normative reasons is nonetheless possible if (...) the connection between normative reasons and motivating considerations is a competence-based correspondence. (shrink)

Should the existence of moral disagreement reduce one’s confidence in one’s moral judgments? Many have claimed that it should not. They claim that we should be morally self-sufficient: that one’s moral judgment and moral confidence ought to be determined entirely one’s own reasoning. Others’ moral beliefs ought not impact one’s own in any way. I claim that moral self-sufficiency is wrong. Moral self-sufficiency ignores the degree to which moral judgment is a fallible cognitive process like all the rest. In this (...) paper, I take up two possible routes to moral self-sufficiency.First, I consider Robert Paul Wolff’s argument that an autonomous being is required to act from his own reasoning. Does Wolff’s argument yield moral self-sufficiency? Wolff’s argument does forbid unthinking obedience. But it does not forbid guidance: the use of moral testimony to glean evidence about nonmoral states of affairs. An agent can use the existence of agreement or disagreement as evidence concerning the reliability of their own cognitive abilities, which is entirely nonmoral information. Corroboration and discorroboration yields nonmoral evidence, and no reasonable theory of autonomy can forbid the use of nonmoral evidence. In fact, by using others to check on my own cognitive functionality, an agent is reasoning better and is thereby more autonomous.Second, I consider Philip Nickel’s requirement that moral judgment proceed from personal understanding. I argue that the requirement of understanding does forbid unthinking obedience, but not discorroboration. When an agent reasons morally, and then reduces confidence in their judgments through discorroboration, they are in full contact with the moral reasons, and with the epistemic reasons. Discorroboration yields more understanding, not less. (shrink)